COLUMN: Aviate emptor

I hate to fly! I’m going on a tirade today. You may want to switch channels. “Caveat Emptor,” or “Let the buyer beware,” is a Latin phrase I learned a long time ago while a student at Knocksville Community College in Lick Skillet, Ind.

I suffered through some situations that left the bitter taste of defeat and embarrassment in my mouth. Had I known the adage earlier in life, it would have prevented some unfortunate events that cost me time, money and humiliation

I have created a new axiom, “Aviate Emptor,” which means “Let the flyer beware.”

It must be said that BW and I do not fly very often any more. Some years, we do not fly at all, and some years, perhaps once and on rare occasions twice. We are not seasoned travelers, and we must look like the Clampetts as we trudge through airports.

We struggle through the terminal, and I feel as if I’m clad in bib overalls, straw hat, blue chambray shirt and brown brogans with BW wearing her print dress made of feed sacks, a hat with dangling price tag, dark brown heavy cotton stockings and sandals from the thrift shop. We are dragging our hardsided Samsonite luggage, circa 1956, when there were no wheels on luggage.

Flying has become an amazingly arduous process. Just getting onto the plane is a task that would flummox Hercules.

In my salad days, I was in an FFA group that visited a slaughter house in Indy. Cattle, frightened out of their minds, were brought in by truck, disgorged into the holding pens blissfully unaware of their fate. They were herded, punched and prodded down myriads of chutes to their death.

That is how I feel in an airport. Once on a trip to Europe, I was forced to navigate four major airports in one day: Indy, Chicago, London and Vienna. If I am ever faced with that again, I will throw myself into a jet engine and come out the back like confetti at a New Year’s Eve party.

After running the maze of death to get to the plane, it seems I am often stuck behind a piece of human cholesterol clogging the arterial aisle while she changes her shoes, stuffs a 6-foot Teddy bear in the overhead and rearranges her shorts. It seems that every flight, the flight attendants shave at least an inch off my knee caps with the refreshment wheelbarrow.

Several years before the regulations changed, I remember being behind a guy who had taped a refrigerator box together and filled it with live hyenas and was using a fork lift to get it into the overhead bin. It was like trying to fit Mike and Molly into wetsuits without using talcum powder. In today’s world, travelers are limited to only one vulture, one buzzard, one crow or one hyena because of the limitation of one “carrion” per person. Get it?

I have traveled to Europe several times on vacation and on mission trips. Flight attendants for Austrian Air, British Airways, KLM, Aer Lingus and others are mostly young svelte females, dressed to the nines, smelling like White Shoulders and as cute as can be.

I must be gentle here, but because of all the rights movements in the USA, many female American flight attendants are at least pulling 40 years, stocky, settling into middle-age spread, wearing hair nets, shoes that Flo wore on Mel’s Diner, wearing discarded IU Marching Hundred band uniforms bought from PrettyGoodUniforms.com. There are a few men, and they are so ugly, they make Harvey Weinstein look handsome by comparison.

Somewhere along the way, some attendants have become cranky. It is a tough job, but they pretend that they don’t hate me. They crank up the mock civility that betrays their honest hatred of the masses of disease-bearing hordes that plod onto the plane at each stop. Why don’t they admit that in the long ago, they made the horrible vocational choice to become a waitress [I know that is not acceptable jargon anymore] in the sky. Now their feet are killing them, their varicose veins throb, and their hair resembles SOS pads because of the dry air on the plane.

No one pays any attention as they talk about safety: “Tug on the mask and tube and breathe normally in the case of an emergency.”

Bet me, that thing looks like the end of a tube of biscuits attached to an IV drip bag tube.

Don’t you hate it when you are crammed into coach, and they pull that curtain closed so you can’t see the Haute Monde in first class? Does their cabin break off in case of an emergency like James Bond and fly away while the rest of us become s’mores?

That is my perspective. You may disagree with me.

Larry Vandeventer grew up north of Calvertville on a farm and graduated from Worthington High School and Indiana State University — four times. He can be reached at Goosecrick@aol.com or 317-839-7656. Vandeventer’s website is Larryvandeventer.com.